I stumbled upon this film playing on Showtime and found it to be so riddled with stereotypes that it's hard to watch. 'Diary of a Tired Black Man' is a low-budget, hybrid drama/documentary, which apparently sets out to present and answer the question of why black women and men are incompatible.
The film is not a technically beautiful one, but I'm a huge independent film fan, so I can live with the flaws. The single greatest problem with this film is that it took a subject matter ripe with possibility (an intimate look at Black Relationships in America) and turned it into a lopsided tirade against half of its subject matter--black women--which does the film its greatest disservice.
In between interviews with an assortment of people across America (this film would've fared better solely as a documentary) , the filmmaker interjects staged, dramatic moments surrounding the diary of a 'Tired Black Man,' Jimmy Jean Louis. The badly-written scenes, which are apparently designed to help audiences understand why this particular black man is 'tired,' only highlight the lead's poor choice in a high-maintenance, gorgeous but self-absorbed, airhead. This is a mistake that American men of all races have made, nothing race-based or shocking here, but the laborious scenes, interspersed with the interviews, gives the film a disjointedness that's exhausting to watch. Even Jimmy Jean Louis looks like he'd rather be elsewhere.
With the 'Tired Black Man's' diary writing as its basis, the film seeks to validate nearly two hours of raced-based drivel, without really getting to the heart of the matter: People are ultimately people. Men will be men and women will be women. To single-out universal, relationship issues as a stereotypically 'black problem' is just, well... 'Tired.'
Don't believe the 10 star reviews here written in the same voice. It's truly an abuse of IMDb and an insult to film-making.